In this episode Per talks to Pericle Salvini from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna about his work with social, ethical and legal issues in robotics today. We also hear about the Robolaw project that will provide advice to the European Union when it creates laws concerning robotics.

In this episode we hear how the Spanish robotic startup Adele is creating a marketplace for robotics software. Through their platform, robot developers can buy software components for their robots, and software developers can sell their code, in a practical way. Examples of the software components, Adele calls them sparks, are speech recognition, synthetic speech, vision systems and user interface components. Their flagship project FIONA allows users to create intelligent and interactive virtual avatars.

In this episode we hear from Professor Gurvinder Virk from the University of Gävl about how international standards are created in the ISO.
He also tells us why he thinks they are essential for robotics and how you can participate and contribute.

In this episode, we talk with Kate Darling from the MIT Media Lab, about giving rights to social robots. She tells us about a recent Pleo torture session she organized at the LIFT conference and the class she taught at Harvard Law School on "Robot Rights".

In this episode Per talks to Michael Mangan from the University of Edinburgh about using robotics to study and replicate insect behaviour. Mangan describes his studies of desert ants, that are able to accurately navigate arduous environments despite having a very small brain (less than 400 000 neurons). This is an interesting problem as the desert environment is very challenging, it is too hot for pheromone navigation and nearly featureless, making visual navigation difficult.

In today's episode we cover the EU Robotics Week that took place during the last week of November and featured robotics related activities across Europe for the general public, highlighting growing importance of robotics in a wide variety of application areas. More than 130 organizations (companies, universities, research institutes) in 19 European countries organized over 360 robotics related activities. About 80,000 people have been reached across Europe, many of them high school students and elementary school pupils. We talk with Thilo Brodtmann, Director of EUnited Robotics, and Organizer of the event, about his first impressions following the EU Robotics week. Asim Ikram from the Danish Technological Institute tells us about logistic robots in the healthcare sector. Finally, we talk with Barbara Klein, Professor at the Fachhochschule Frankfurt, about emotional robots such as Paro and their therapeutic use for kids or the elderly.

In this episode Per talks to robotics enthusiast and investment fund manager Renaud Champion. Champion is co-founder of the professional investment fund Robolution Capital, that focuses on investing in service robotics in the European market.
Champion believes that service robotics has great growth potential, both in the professional and the domestic market. With a target of 60 million euros in funding, he is actively trying to promote development by building an effective ecosystem for robotics, including entrepreneurs, investors, advisers and users. In the interview he also shares some thoughts on what he looks for in a potential investment, as well as his views on the European robotics market, vs. that in the US and Asia.